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NEA launches Common Core lesson-sharing website

Posted on 01/21/14 at 3:48pm

Could you use more than 3,000 classroom-ready lessons created by Master Teachers and built entirely for the Common Core State Standards? NEA's new website, cc.betterlesson.com, can deliver them to you.

"The new Common Core State Standards are a transformation for the students in our nation's public school system and we owe it to them to provide teachers with the time, tools and resources to get it right," said National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel. "The best ideas for the classroom come from classroom teachers, and our new site will allow educators to share lessons to help ensure all students have the skills they need to succeed."

BetterLesson, an edtech startup, teamed with NEA last summer on its Master Teacher Project to provide this professional development resource for its members. The Master Teacher Project recruited 130 plus teachers from across the country to provide the lessons they actually use to teach math and English Language Arts to their own students every day. Thirty K-5 math teachers; 42 6-12 math teachers; and 66 K-12 ELA teachers were chosen.

Each week, these teachers will be sharing their lessons for grades K-12 in math and English Language Arts so they can be used immediately in classrooms. By the end of the project, each Master Teacher will have shared a full year's worth of lessons-more than 120 lessons.

Through a narrative reenacting those lessons, Master Teachers will share the "how" and "why of the lesson; videos of instructional strategies; their thoughts on their implementation of CCSS; resources they've tried; and examples of student work.

NEA saw a real need for the lessons. A poll by NEA showed that 75 percent of NEA members support Common Core State Standards, but only a third of them have participated in any worthwhile training on its implementation. In collaboration with NEA, BetterLesson hopes to help teachers become more prepared by providing five to 10 lessons for every Standard. They expect to have more than 16,000 Master Teacher lessons live by the fall of 2015.